The much awaited and highly anticipated Google Chrome OS, that has the online community jumping with excitement, has finally made its way to the users’ machines in the form of a virtual boot. The test version has been released in the form of a VMware image of Google Chrome OS, that can be tested on the systems in the form of a virtual environment. The peer to peer torrent file for the Google Chrome  virtual boot is available at the Pirate Bay.

The all new Google Chrome OS boasts a much fast boost timing than that of the current operating systems. The Google OS is now known to be completely web oriented, as the applications that will entail the Chrome OS will be more different than the conventional applications found on today’s operating systems, as these new apps will consist of URLs and online functioning.

The entire settings and applications in Google Chrome are known to be completely online and have very limited offline capabilities. Features such as GMail, Google Docs and other Google tools and even the notepad in Google Chrome OS will all be internet dependent. Google Chrome OS is expected to make it debut next year, but as per inside sources, the operating system will be built with specific reference hardware and will be provided with especially with original equipment manufacturers.

Via Life Hacker & The Pirate Bay.

There might not be any individual who has an online presence and doesn’t use one of many Google services. Be it the Google search engine, Google Talk or GMail, we all have at some point of time used Google services and some of us might even have wondered as to what Google does with all the data it collects? There have also been serious questions raised over Google’s extreme secrecy over user data.

So, in an effort to lay to rest all the doubts and suspicions, Google has launched the Google Dashboard, a service that, provides users with comprehensive statistics about their activities on Google’s various services. Along with providing user statistics for services such as, Gmail, Picasa Web Albums, Web History, Checkout, Reader and YouTube, Google Dashboard also gives the users the freedom to customize the settings for each services on a single page.

According to Shuman Ghosemajumder (Business Product Manager, Google),

“For the most part, the data was accessible to you in a piecemeal fashion. This is about providing you with a one-stop shop to see all of the data about you in various products.”

Google Dashboard can be termed as a mirror to one’s online habits, as it gives the users complete information and control over the Google products that they use. However, security analysts and advocates are criticizing Google for launching this service, stating that, Google Dashboard could lead to increased and dangerous privacy issues.

Via New York Times.

Your contacts included in social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn, or part of your address book from Gmail or Outlook can serve as a means of PeopleMaps to indicate the connections that lead to unknown professional or a large company.

Created by the 7 Degrees, the PeopleMaps requests access to the User Account on Facebook, LinkedIn, Yahoo Mail and Gmail, and allow the publication of the contact file from Microsoft Outlook, to assemble a map of the contacts digital internet user.

Once the information from different sources is consolidated, the map (in JavaScript) separates the contacts as the initials of the surnames, centralizing the user.

Double click on each group detailing which are listed there, with colors indicating whether the contact is professional, academic or personal. Colleagues past or present are connected automatically to the company that describes the user used to work.

With the graph structure, the PeopleMaps allows the User to search among specific companies or professionals. The results show how connections between the contacts of the user in the various social networks can be combined to achieve an executive or an agency, for example.The service can be viewed as an exercise that tests the theory of six degrees of connection, proposed in 1967 by researcher Stanley Milgram, that anyone is only six connections from anyone else on the planet.

The experiment was used as the basis for the book “Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age.”

Via: People Maps.

Sending emails constantly for certain groups of people, you take the risk of making mistakes in typing an address and include a wrong person. To avoid those possible situations in the future, Google threw for Gmail users a new resource under the category Labs, after awhile without presenting anything new in there.

Entitle Got the wrong Bob?, it is capable to learn the addressees’ sequence that you choose for the people’s groups with whom you keep in touch. So, it recognizes when you miss the name of somebody in a group of contacts in the moment of composing an email, suggesting the name and address correction before the message to be sent.

Obviously, that will just work with three people’s groups or more. To complement the release, the giant search engine it also changed the name of a Labs already existent in Gmail, Suggest more recipients, that allows you to complemental a group of addressees for who an email will be sent, when you forget of mentioning an address that was present in previous messages. Now, the name is Don t forget Bob.

To try that new Labs of Gmail, just go to Configurations of the service and to select Labs to activate it. It will be necessary to reload the page after the activation

Via: GMail Blog.

Experts believe that there is an ‘industry-wide phishing scheme.’ Based on the ‘more than 30,000 account details’ that have been posted online, it looks like phishing may yet be the current Internet scourge, and we are well-advised to change our online passwords every three months as well as not use the same log-in details for multiple sites. Phishing scams use fake websites to attract users into disclosing their personal data such as bank account details or login names to hackers. All in all, it’s the swindling strategy and the mentality of gullibility on the part of the potential victim.

Google’s web-based email system, Gmail, has been made part of the target.  Other web-based email systems are being victimized as well. Google’s response is to ‘immediately safeguard the affected accounts.’ Thus far, there are ‘two lists that detail more than 30,000 names and passwords from e-mail providers, including Yahoo and AOL, that were posted online.’ ‘The lists also include details of thousands of Microsoft Hotmail users. Google said fewer than 500 of its accounts had been affected by the scam.’

According to Google, “We recently became aware of an industry-wide phishing scheme through which hackers gained user credentials for web-based mail accounts including Gmail accounts. As soon as we learned of the attack, we forced password resets on the affected accounts. We will continue to force password resets on additional accounts when we become aware of them.”

Google, though, admits that it has ‘discovered a third list’ but would not yet disclose how many accounts the latest list contains.

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Via BBC

It’s bad news on AOL’s side as they have been gradually losing market share. To add to this rude fate, AOL has also fallen to the No.4 spot, which is a notch below Google’s Gmail service. According to the recent statistics revealed by ComScore show that AOL’s monthly visitors went down from 45.1 million in July 2008 to 36.4 million in July 2009, which is a 19% drop. In order to revive their fortunes and get back their popularity, AOL plans to either acquire or partner with Startups.

Brad Garlinghouse, formerly a senior Vice President at Yahoo has joint AOL as the President of Internet and Mobile Communications that includes AOL’s e-mail and instant messaging. Garlinghouse is interesting in making AIM interoperable with Facebook and Skype so that the fate of AOL could be ameliorated faster.

On the contrary, Google’s Gmail is experiencing a great traffic rate. Within July 2008 to July 2009, Gmail grew at the rate of 46%. This is a terrific growth and they might raise Windows Live Hotmail by next February should they maintain this rate. There definitely is a tough competition in the web world. It’s getting more interesting as time passes by.

Via: Gigaom\InformationWeek

The repercussion of the Gmail flaw in the afternoon yesterday that it was not very serious, but it delayed enough time for almost to drop Twitter with so much people complaining at the same time. However, the repercussion was so big that the engineers felt in the obligation of provide a deposition on what happened.

Summarizing the whole history, the engineers of Google took down some servers at the beginning of the afternoon for routine maintenance and they didn’t notice that the level of accesses to Gmail was so big that quickly it began to overload and to lock router servers, vital to access the service.

It happens that the accounts and the data of Gmail users all are dispersed and duplicated in an infinity of servers in different dates centers, however the access has to start from gateways, that address the requests for each server. As those gateways began to be dropped, nobody could get to access Gmail.

Surprisingly, the access through IMAP and POP was not committed, because the gateways used for them are different.

As it informs Google Apps Status Dashboard the flaw of the service lasted about an hour and a half.

Ben Treynor, vice-president and czar of reliability of all sites from Google, affirms that the episode served so that his team noticed that some measured need to be taken to guarantee that the service stays accessible even with overloads as the one yesterday. The infrastructure of gateways of Google will be better equipped and their engineers will work to guarantee that problems in a date center no more affect the access the Gmail users.

Via: The Washington Post.

Opera has been a warrior and so much in the fight to create a powerful internet navigator and full of resources. But in spite of that, it never got to obtain the same repercussion and popularity of Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome. And that is lamentable because it Opera 10 incorporates a series of intelligent functions that any one accustomed to navigate in the web it will find welcome.

As in the previous versions, the navigator Operates 10 is fast, highly configurable and with a clean appearance, offering basically everything that we need from a modern software to navigate in the web, including pop-ups blocker, plug-ins, RSS reader, Speed Dial, anti-phishing tool and much more.

The design is lighter than in the previous versions of the navigator, but the innovations are going besides a simple make-up in the interface. The manipulation of tabs was gotten better and the user can tell to the browser to exhibit thumbnails from the open windows above each tab (in fact, the size of the miniatures is also configurable).

The function Speed Dial is really worthwhile. In that way, the user can arrive more quickly to the site than he or she wants: the only thing he or she has to do is to click in the miniature.

Opera always exhibited web pages quickly. The version 10 is capable to do that still faster, particularly those that use countless resources, like Gmail and Facebook. The Opera says that the navigator is 40% faster.

There is a great number of other innovations, such as Inline Spell check, particularly useful for who uses blogs services. There is also Opera Turbo, a compression technology that makes possible to navigate quickly even in slow connections.

Should you substitute your current navigator for the new Opera? The choice of the navigator is a strictly personal decision. But any user that wants to use a navigator really fast and with some very interesting functionalities, should try Opera 10.

Via: Techtree.

Gmail has reportedly surpassed AOL in terms of e-mail services for the month of July. As per the latest ComScore figures, Gmail has achieved an estimated 37 million unique visitors, as against AOL’s figure of 36.4 million. However, Gmail still has a lot of work to do to come close to its closet rival in the e-mail race, Windows Live Hotmail, that witnessed an astounding 47 million unique visitors. Yahoo! On the other hand is still the foremost e-mail service in the world, with 106 million monthly unique visitors.

Even being in the third place of the e-mail list, Google still saw a rise of 25% in its monthly unique visitors, as against AOL E-mail, that witnessed a decline of 22% in its monthly user visitations. Windows Live Hotmail witnessed an 8 percent increase and Yahoo Mail saw a 16% increase in the monthly unique user visitations.

However, many believe that, Google can easily surpass both Hotmail and Yahoo1 in the near future, provided that it is able to entice new users and provide more features via the Google Labs. Another ways to ensure its continued success, can be a dramatic increase in the storage capacity of Gmail, as against of 7,358 megabytes.

Via Gadgetell.

The online realm witnessed a series of DOS (Denial of Service) attacks on two of the most prominent social networking websites, Facebook and Twitter along with one of the biggest names in the search industry, Google also suffering the same fate on Gmail an other Google services.

As of now the sources and the intention behind these attacks is unknown, but it has been clarified that a Georgian blogger, who is also known as ‘Cyxymu“ is believed to be the target of these attacks, as he has accounts on Twitter, Facebook LiveJournal, Google Blogger and YouTube.  According to Max Kelly (Chief Security Officer),

“It was a simultaneous attack across a number of properties targeting him to keep his voice from being heard. We’re actively investigating the source of the attacks and we hope to be able to find out the individuals involved in the back end and to take action against them if we can. You have to ask who would benefit the most from doing this and think about what those people are doing and the disregard for the rest of the users and the Internet.”

During a DoS attack, several computers are instructed to visit a particular website, all at the same time, thereby burdening the website’s servers to the extent of disabling the website. Soon after Twitter was hit, Facebook and Google also suffered the DDoS attack, along with the popular blogging service, LiveJournal. The Twitter attack that has plagued the website for 24 hours now, has been attributed to the Koobface virus, that has apprently been resurrected and a given an overhaul. The  Koobface virus essentially displays a “my video” page that requires the users to update their flash players, that many users usually do. After the “updation”, instead of an updated flash player, the users get the Koobface virus in their systems.

According to Facebook spokesperson,

“Earlier this morning, Facebook encountered network issues related to an apparent distributed denial of service attack, that resulted in degraded service for some users. No user data was at risk and we have restored full access to the site for most users.”

Graham Cluley, (Senior Analyst, Sophos) said,

“This seems like far too much to be a coincidence. The fact that the attacks have hit Facebook and LiveJournal as well as Twitter means that hundreds of millions more people could have been impacted by the website outages.”

Via Guardian & Cnet & Twitter Blog.